The end of the twentieth century was a time of transition. The regime of low-intensity warfare, the dismantling of the welfare state, and neo-liberal privatization schemes ultimately was running its course[1]. The final defeats were to be dolled out across the world in the eventual collapse of finance bubbles, widespread resistance to austerity, and the implosive of the economies of Latin America[2]. Before this was all but said and done, there was the gradual and later meteoric rise and fall of social movements against neo-liberal reforms and the militarism leading to the afghan and Iraq wars. Revolutionaries played an active and disproportionate role in mobilizing the social actors in what would become the largest mobilizations of their kind.

Time has passed, and the limitations and deflation of the early 2000s anti-globalization and anti-war movements are becoming clearer to many revolutionaries. Though massive mobilizations occurred, little lasting organization was built. This means that the militancy we witnessed in the streets had a very short shelf life, and much of the work can reasonably be said to have disappeared. Millions of people engaged in various forms of resistance to the wars, globalization, and the new forms of capital and state; however the left was not able to produce a sustained alternative that was able to engage, nurture, and develop that activity into a lasting movement against capitalism and the state. While seemingly militant direct action was relatively common, this militancy rarely led to further radicalization or the popularization of struggle. Power was built, but dissipated. The left had not developed the ability or perhaps the orientation to build movements, either mass movements or revolutionary ones.

The decline of the era of activist mobilizations was an interlude to a series of economic failures coming to a close. Capital had been able to delay escalating crises in previous decades through expansion of markets into new proletarianized workforces, seizing new assets and bringing them into the market via privatization schemes, austerity programs, and financialization of markets with new financial “products” such as derivatives, currency trading, and the like. A series of bursting bubbles eventually brought us to the brink. Though people dispute the beginning or the trajectory, we can see a continuity of bubbles from the finance scandals of the 80s and 90s, the dot-com bubble, post-September 11 accounting scandals, and the real estate bubble. Resistance both by social movements in the developing and developed worlds forced the ruling class recompositions[3], and likewise bred new resistance. The ensuing crisis has brought a new era of austerity, following previous austerities, and a culmination of decades of ruling class assaults on the basic living conditions of workers and oppressed classes across the globe.

Presently in an environment of austerity, the most politically significant and powerful mass movements in the US are movements from the right, often with organized tendencies of conscious neo-fascist forces. In an era of ruling class assaults and austerity, it has been the right that has been most successful in responding to organizing the oppressed classes. While the left is quite conscious of this, the left’s isolated position makes a serious challenge more difficult and questionable.

At the same time no major progressive mass movements provide a counterweight to the ruling class assaults, restructuring, cuts, and collaborationist mass organizations. Unions are nearing a crisis with decades of attacks on the social compact which gave the unions a stable base in the American economy. As we reach new lows for unions in terms of position and power in major industries, many unions are choosing not to organize at all and others are attempting to launch of quixotic crusade for labor-management partnership while management prepares for total liquidation of the unions. Many environmental groups actively partner with major capitalist interests, and have become support bases for green consumerism.

The institutional left has largely sought to save capitalism as was done in the Great Depression, through a combination of state intervention and a social compact between capital and institutionalized forms of social organization (unions and NGOs). Our time is however different and capital itself has evolved beyond the prior compositions. The New Deal era social welfare programs were based on a time when capitalism required a highly productive and predictable workforce, which was guaranteed by unions as mediators on the shop floor and social welfare programs in the community. No analogy exists in our time of international capital, the dismantling of the welfare state, and increasingly fractured state rule. It is unlikely that even if capital had the will to find such a solution, it would be able to solve the fundamental causes of this crisis which is not merely a lack of jobs or capital, but in fact the global organization of production and the break down of the balance of forces, both proletarian and capitalist[4].

The existing organs of the institutional left (the unions, the NGOs, and the liberal and social democratic political machinery) have not built up mass movements, but rather organizations with a service orientation towards the working and oppressed classes. Our goal is not to judge these movements merely evaluatively. As revolutionaries, we should seek to understand what potential there is for building and supporting the mass popular movements for the revolutionary transformations that can abolish capital and replace it with a classless society administered and organized by all for all. Setting aside questions of how much these institutions actually do to protect and expand life under capitalism (for which they also fail significantly); as revolutionaries who seek not just to win day-to-day struggles but also to transform the systemic causes of exploitation, we need to evaluate our role in these institutions, their role in capitalism, and the potential for transformation in mass movements.

The issue then is this. Whatever level of practice there is amongst the mass organizations is social democratic practice. Revolutionaries, for the very few who do have a level of activity in mass organizations, tend to have social democratic practice in these organizations. In actuality, this social democratic practice is probably the most advanced and progressive even compared to the tiny fractions of revolutionaries trying to build a mass practice. Revolutionary practice, because of the low level of struggle and isolation of the left from direct rank-and-file struggle, is in its infancy. There is a large gap between ideas and action, and in our time it is worth questioning the extent to which ideology does work. If radical ideology yields social democratic practice, and at times social democrats outpace radicals we should question that relationship.

We can reasonably ask questions of the existing mass organizations (to the extent they actually function as mass organizations): (1) do they organize their members, engaging them in collective activity and struggle, and (2) if so, to what ends, and (3) to the extent this does happen, how much does it facilitating conditions for revolutionary transformation or create openings for developing militants of the left committed to social transformation? We might even add, to what extent does the left presence in the NGOs, unions, and liberal political machinery translate into an advance of revolutionary practice, theory, and organization?

The overwhelming majority would answer no to the first. Instead activity is professionalized service activity, and is integrated into existing channels of struggle within the capitalist and state infrastructure. Nor do most NGOs and unions engage in collective struggle, opting instead for lobbying, attempting to elect representatives, and legalistic maneuvering which can be called struggle only in the most vague and meaningless sense. While collective struggle leverages power based on the collective strength of social classes united in action, legalistic maneuvering relies upon the skills and activity of a narrow class of professionals and decision making that stands outside the grasp of collectivities. It is possible to engage in collective pressuring of institutions of power, but this is different from believing that lobbying, candidate work, and filing lawsuits is itself collective struggle.

Due to the pitched antagonism presently towards any autonomous working class movement, there are contradictions. Some unions for example must fight for their survival in a hostile environment (particularly service sector unions), and in some instances must fight hard against bosses. Even if we’re charitable in the content of these fights, any semblance of activity and organization gets dropped following a contract period. The unions actively promote working together with the bosses, and organize workplaces for labor peace in an era of ruling class cut backs and brutal assaults. The NGOs, often funded directly by major capitalists and the state, have taken up social service functions of the state and have centralized organizing activity into a professional bureaucracy without building up popular organs of collective activity and power. This is the case even when NGOs have nominal revolutionary administrators and explicitly talk about their work in terms of building movement, or worse revolution.

When collective organization and struggle does occur in these institutions, to what ends do they fight? Besides largely symbolic actions (perhaps resolutions passed against wars, symbolic strikes and marches), these institutions are firmly rooted within the bounds of the left-wing of the capitalist class. There are numerous examples that are worth spending a little time reflecting on.

The boring-from-within union reform movement has a section that comes out of revolutionary politics. Most prominently Solidarity (US) is active in union reform movements across the United States, and is one of the main driving forces behind Labor Notes, the labor reform publication with associated movements and conferences. Despite 80+ years of the failure of communist-led union reform movements to produce either reformed unions or communist practice, the basic tenets of reforming the unions through running slates, electioneering, and bureaucratic reform measures is unquestioned. Teamsters for a Democratic Union, which had many Solidarity organizers within, won control of the Teamsters for a period in the early 90s. Many laudable reforms were introduced, and there were strides made to increase organizing and transparency in a notoriously corrupt union. Still, from a revolutionary perspective we should ask, what was built? Where is the mass movement of Teamsters organizing combatively, and where is the revolutionary practice to emerge from this? In fact what we have is a social democratic practice of business unionism and liberal politics, but under revolutionary pretenses. The union reform movement’s emphasis on positions of leadership, staff organizer positions, and structural reform on the system and union’s own term kept these struggles contained by the existing bureaucracies. Just as Ron Carey’s presidency was recuperated and contained, we repeat the experiences of communist reformism in the unions from another era. Walther Reuther was elected by a communist opposition on a union reform basis. Reuther would eventually become the opponent of the same opposition that led him to power, just as the union reform movement itself is an opposition to a revolutionary practice in the unions in our time[5].

Perhaps another famous example is that of Van Jones. Van Jones was once an NGO staff-cum-Maoist in the Bay Area political grouping STORM (Standing Together to Organize a Revolutionary Movement) made up largely of the administrative staff of leftist led NGOs. While it is worth questioning Jones’ radicalism (he seems more like a fellow traveler passing through, than a committed revolutionary), it is worth reflecting on the activist->ngo staff-> white house trajectory. As some have noted[6], the institutions of power are filled with people who think or thought of themselves as radicals, but who function largely to serve and protect capitalism (or at least their progressive version of it). Van Jones’ Green Capitalism is one such project, and we can look to Carl Davidson promotion of Progressives for Obama and similar reformist capitalist visions[7] as yet another. Whatever the revolutionary ideas or credentials of these particular people, there is a strong link between these ideas (which have strong currency on the left, in spite of their ties to the most major institutions of state power and capitalism) and the institutions (NGOs, progression electoral organizations, and unions). The politics may be on the surface revolutionary, but its role in functioning is not merely reformist but actually constitutive of capitalist power relationships. These radical leaders help reinforce and expand capitalism from inside the system even from a position of supposed opposition.

We see similar dynamics at a more local grass roots level as well. There is a long history of communist electioneering, but recently there has been an emergence of Maoist-inspired politics in NGO staff. Freedom Road Socialist Organization (not the Midwest pro-Stalin split organized around the paper Fight Back) is the most characteristic organization which has a high concentration of NGO and union staff. Freedom Road has a long history of electoralism dating back to Jesse Jackson’s Presidential campaign[8], which members of today’s Freedom Road supported and helped organize. Recently, Freedom Road members have been instrumental in election work within NGOs including voter-turn out campaigns, endorsing Democratic Party candidates, and promoting electioneering as a revolutionary strategy both primarily and through voter organizations aiming for “new majorities”[9]. This NGO-revolutionary unity has sought to organize and rally their organizations behind sections of capitalist power[10]. Organizing Upgrade (a new media site that features NGO staff, Freedom Road members, and Maoist-inspired writings) is worth looking at for detailed insight into this new reformism-as-revolution ideology. For an in depth look at the theoretical justification for these electoralist adventures by the staff doing the work, it is definitely worth reading Organizing Upgrade’s “Fast Forum: Electoral Organizing”[11]. What is most interesting is the total conflation of mass movements and attempting to leverage either positions of power or shifts in policy. We see revolutionaries engaged in activity which objectively strengthens the electoral process, takes up positions within the power structure, and actively attempts to bring masses into the system’s means of settling disputes on its own terms. Despite the Maoist origin of this current of NGO staff, the ideology is much more clearly coming from the historical reformist communist currents such as euro-communism. This is clear for example in an interview with two organizers in Virginians for a New Majority who draw from Poulantzas who, perhaps unintentionally, became the theoretician for euro-communism’s embrace of the capitalist social democratic state in Italy and Spain a generation ago[12].

“We believe that our strategic approach should draw from Poulantzas and create political space that neither builds a parallel state that leads to a complete replacement of the old with the new, nor simply elects new people to fill the existing state. By creating new structures and laws we seek to create fissures that increasingly alter the class, race and gender power disposition of the state. Examples of this may include efforts at democratizing the system – same day voter registration or mail in voting, felon voter registration (still an arduous process in Virginia and elsewhere in the south), others might work to eliminate structural obstacles that systematically disempower people of color such as statewide election of senators, non-proportional elections, or participatory budgeting. Others challenges could seek to democratize the economy through taxes on financial transactions or community control over banks or other flows of capital[13]”.

In so far as membership is engaged at all politically (beyond high sounding lectures), it is to mobilize with de facto support of capitalist social and political institutions even when under a red banner.

The most naked display of the embrace of playing the “cop within the movement” was shown in leaked emails from NGO staff in the Bay Area during the Oscar Grant trial. Advance the Struggle, a bay area revolutionary organization, published an expose of sorts clearly demonstrating the way in which local NGO bureaucracies embraced a role of trying to work with local city and police authorities in diverting organizing and anger surrounding the police brutality in favor of “voicing one’s opinion” and “making music”[14]. The Urban Peace Movement sent an email in which it revealed that they had “…been in preliminary conversation with some of our partners an allies up to this point including the Ella Baker Center, Youth UpRising, Oakland Rising, BWOPA, The Mayor’s Office and the City of Oakland regarding these suggestions. Let’s continue to be in dialog and hold each other close in the challenging days ahead.”[15] Note that Oakland Rising is one of the groups represented in Organizing Upgrade’s Electoral Organizing article, and the NGO staff proclaims “We don’t believe in struggle, we believe in winning”. The Urban Peace Movement staffer lays out the method that this grouping of state and NGO officials will use to contain coming agitation surrounding the immanent letting loose of Oscar Grant’s murderer. Whatever critiques there are of symbolic protest violence, and I think there are, it is not random that the response of the NGO bureaucracy is to defend the state in this instance and to consciously “inoculate” and “create avenues of expression”. The position of NGOs constitutively within capitalism reinforcing its social relationships, hierarchies, and distribution of power pushes radicals in these directions, often in contradiction to their self-conception and their language.

The issue is not whether these institutions do some good. Humanistically they do improve humanity and this should be supported. The problem is that these institutions consistently rally behind ruling class interests, often against the working class, and are organized against the building self-activity of the class. Noticeably off the table are fighting mass organizations whose basis and activity are founded on the collective interest and activity of a class working autonomously. There is a glaring absence of organizations working to build up a class alternative of workers acting directly and collectively to build independent class power capable of breaking with capitalism.

Whatever struggles can emerge outside of these institutions find themselves facing significant repression, cooptation, and difficulty taking an organized and sustained path. The left is generally isolated both in practice and ideologically from the oppressed classes. Whatever exceptions there are remain localized, cordoned off, and contained at this time. This is not to dismiss out of hand the crucial work occurring in various NGOs, unions, academic circles, and revolutionary organizations. It is not difficult to see what would occur without a positive social force fighting back. Still it is important to ask harder questions about why the good work has systematically been retarded, and why the bureaucratized movements are so dominant.

This situation has meant that whatever solutions and responses the revolutionary left is developing at this time is largely internal to the left, and without sufficient practice to clarify our attempts. In the recent history of North America, this has generally been the case. This severing of theory from practice has contributed to our problems moving forward, building organized revolutionary forces capable of contributing to mass movements, and developing revolutionary consciousness, practice, and catalysts.

With the unions, the social democratic trends, and NGOs lining up behind an increasingly desperate attempt to save capitalism through populist-electoralism and state-interventionist measures, the necessity of an autonomous working class alternative is pressing. There is broadly speaking a crisis in the institutionalized left and its allied radical currents. The path to an autonomous working class alternative is not merely a matter of organizing, or being proficient. There are objective forces that necessitate a strategy, and one that meets the reality of our time. The method for this is intermediate organizing, which I explore in my companion article Towards Political Organization for Our Time: trajectories of struggle, the intermediate level, and political rapprochement[16].

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Comments (3 of 3)

As this piece notes, it's not very crowded up front. But if you want to develop some revolutionary practice in non-revolutionary conditions, my suggestion is to take stock of that situation, make an estimate and put your ideas into practice. If they're good ones, you'll grow.

But first you have to realize it's not a matter of what YOU want to do, but what the more militant fighters among the masses are willing to do.

Progressive Democrats of America, the main mass group I work with, and which has no official connection with the Democratic party, is actually doing quite a bit and is organizing workers, putting them in the streets and growing. That's because its platform and tactics match what the left edge of the masses are actually ready to do, not what we would WISH them to be doing.

'Progressives for Obama', by the way, is simply a web educational project, which changed its name long ago to 'Progressive America Rising' after the election period.

But I think it rather foolish to blame everyone else simply because you can't get your own ideas off the ground. We can suck all sorts of strategy and tactics and goals out of our thumbs, and make up whatever we please. But the problem is to come up with something containing your core values that resonates with the working class. They are their own emancipators, and if you can't help formulate approaches that they can embrace as their own, what good are those notions?

This is an excellent statement. I especially like the beginning discussion of the world crisis. It indicates that--while there will be ups and downs--the long-term prospect is for stagnation and decline of world capitalism. This implies that our approach should not be based on the current consciousness of the workers and oppressed (as per Davison orthe other "revolutionaries" who are cited) but primarily on the objective crisis. What is the solution tothiscrisis, to save the working population andthe wold? (The subjective awareness of the people determines how we express the revolutonary program, how we persuade people.) The "revolutionaries" (reformists or centrists) are properly critiqued in the article.

However, there is a confusing melding of different types of organizations. Specifically unions (as organizations, formed by the workers but dominated by the bureaucracy) are different from the NGOs (middle class, essentially pro-capitalist organizations. And organizations which seek to channel unrest into the imperialist Democratic Paraty are simply crossing the class line and are our enemy. The weakness of the left in the US is directly tied to its program of joining the Democrats. (Trotskyist-derived organizations, such as Solidarity or the ISO dream of a third capitalist part, such as a reformist Labor Party or Green Party, whkose only advantage is that it is not the Democratic Party.)

We revolutionary anarchists (which Davison does not claim to be) should be arguing for independent mass struggles, particularly for general strikes, to fight for popular needs. We should call for expropiration of big and many smamm businesses to be ttaken over by the workers and communities, to be democratically managed, and to federate together towards a deocraticly planned economy.

The point about the unions is not to aim to take them over by electing "good leaders" to them, but to see them as arenas for struggle and as structures twithin which to raise programs. It is clear now that the capitalist class prefers to get rid of unions for its own interests.

"first you have to realize it's not a matter of what YOU want to do, but what the more militant fighters among the masses are willing to do."

I agree with the general thrust of this. If you mean that the movement determines the direction and its not up to revolutionaries to decree the strategy, we're on the same page. Willingness though is another matter. There's what people are doing, and what they could do. The real debate is about what is possible. A populist orientation is just to re-assert what is already happening, for instance in the democratic party or it's left-wing, and rename it as revolutionary. That has deeply reactionary potential, and is tied to bureaucratic practices that have proven disastrous for humanity particularly in national liberation struggles. Just because something is happening and is nominally progressive doesn't mean it's actually posing any threat to capitalism or oppression. In fact such left activity actually constitutes capitalism, and in a way strengthens the capitalist system by integrating otherwise threatening elements. Green capitalist initiatives that try to separate out progressive and reactionary parts of capitalism can be said literally to be serving capitalism's hold on us, and should be viewed as the left-wing of capitalism. The left wing of capitalism is still capitalism, and the working classes struggle lies outside and against the capitalist class.

"Progressive Democrats of America, the main mass group I work with, and which has no official connection with the Democratic party, is actually doing quite a bit and is organizing workers, putting them in the streets and growing. That's because its platform and tactics match what the left edge of the masses are actually ready to do, not what we would WISH them to be doing."

I'm a union member. I fight at my work, and attempt to implement my vision through the struggles around my labor. If all that I did was what people were actually doing, I'm not sure how or why I would be a revolutionary. Capitalism is reproduced through the actions of working people everyday in our social relations. Only in breaking with and producing ruptures with capitalist social relations is change even possible. Otherwise we slip into again populism which has deeply reactionary and right-wing tendencies of trying to bring the proletarian movements within the capitalist class and system.

"'Progressives for Obama', by the way, is simply a web educational project, which changed its name long ago to 'Progressive America Rising' after the election period."

Is this perhaps a recognition that the working class of the United States was not quite as actually WITH Obama so much as were the reformist left WISHED they were?

"But I think it rather foolish to blame everyone else simply because you can't get your own ideas off the ground."

The reality is that increasingly autonomous anticapitalist tendencies are precisely the people who are building proletarian movements in the United States and Canada. There is an ever deepening crisis in the social democratic and reformist left precisely because of a fork between a failure of the social democratic strategy in an era of austerity or isolation from actual struggle. This theory I attempt to elaborate was not invented by a professor in Europe, but is part of the collective products of decades of struggles in workplaces, housing, anti-police work, transit organizing, etc. That movement work is solidifying into militants, organizations, theory, and the embryos of mass organizations. As new struggles and movements produce its revolutionaries, increasingly the leftists tied to the system will be put into antagonistic roles based on their vested interests in preserving the system and integrating struggles within its limitations. We need to be conscious of this and understand that work, those ideas, and those people and see where they stand.

Wayne

"Specifically unions (as organizations, formed by the workers but dominated by the bureaucracy) are different from the NGOs (middle class, essentially pro-capitalist organizations. And organizations which seek to channel unrest into the imperialist Democratic Party are simply crossing the class line and are our enemy. The weakness of the left in the US is directly tied to its program of joining the Democrats. (Trotskyist-derived organizations, such as Solidarity or the ISO dream of a third capitalist part, such as a reformist Labor Party or Green Party, whkose only advantage is that it is not the Democratic Party.)"

I agree unions are fundamentally different from NGOs and I apologize if I didn't make that clear enough. The problems with unions and ngos are different, and differ from their class basis and how they struggle and function. The collaborationist orientation of most union bureaucracies has ham-strung the movement, but it's not random. Some unions actually accumulate more money from investments via pensions and the like than they do from dues, creating a a direct incentive to shrink in a way. There is some similarity to the bureaucracies of NGOs and unions in general how they deal with their members and the class as a whole, but my attempt was not to try and fold them but show more the alienation of the left from direct struggle and its context. There are many of us who are fighting and who are in unions, and this work should be lauded, but it should also be placed in a material historical context.

"The point about the unions is not to aim to take them over by electing "good leaders" to them, but to see them as arenas for struggle and as structures twithin which to raise programs. It is clear now that the capitalist class prefers to get rid of unions for its own interests."

To me the key question is not should we fight as workers in union jobs (if you can even get a union job), but how should we fight wherever we are, and what are the strategic fights and methods we should take on.

On May Day, 2012, march as a Popular Front in Montpelier, Vermont in support of:
*Healthcare as a Human Right!
*The Right To Safe Local Farm Food!
*Justice For Migrant Farm Workers!
*The Right For Vermont Workers To Organize!
*The Right of Vermont's Daycare Providers To Organize!
*The Right To A Livable Wage!
*Save Our Post Offices!
*Abenaki/Native American Tribal Forests!
*Town Forests!
*Environmental Justice!
*Renewable Energy Now!
*Justice For Those Impacted By Hurricane Irene!
*Freedon and Unity!
*A People's Democray!

The 2010 Senate elections are barely a month away, and Democrats across the country are getting worried.

In a new poll released last month by Public Policy Polling, Quantifying the Enthusiasm Gap, pollsters have found that in 10 key Senate and gubernatorial races across the country, Republicans are leading by wider margins.

At least 600 arrests took place at the G20 summit in Toronto as police used considerable force to break up protests. Media reports& video (below) indicate that many of the beaten were journalists covering the protest. The G20 was meeting to co-ordinate further attacks on the global working class. This is what the coded statements from the G20 about 'austerity budgets' and 'cutting deficits' will mean in practice. This despite the "risk that synchronised fiscal adjustment across several major economies could adversely impact the recovery" acknowledged in the final G20 communique. [Italiano]

Amidst the Democratic mid-term election victories on November 8th, an independent won the Senate race in Vermont. What is significant is that he is a self-proclaimed socialist and so the first socialist senator in US history. The previous best result in a Senate race by a socialist was in 1930 when Emil Seidel won 6% of the vote.

The EZLN has announced the end of the Red Alert due to the end of the consulta and the announcement of the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. This set of communiques includes the re-opening of the Caracoles and details of the "Sixth Committee" which is to meet with people or organizations who do not participate in elections to form 'the other campaign'. Meetings will then be held in Chiapas of various sectors with the aim of issuing a common statement agreed by all on September 16.

Editoral statement of new Candian publication called 'Upping the Anti' published by the Autonomy & Solidarity website which "is an on-line network for anti-capitalists who believe that revolutionary transformation will come from workers and oppressed people self-organizing from below and not from the top down organizing of any state, party or union bureaucracy"

As we engage in larger social movements, it can be easy to lose sight of our endgame and essentially function as a type of "social democrat." Here are some key reasons and methods for avoiding this, as well as countering the progressive election logic during voting season.

Campaigns teach by more than what is in their written programs. Even if the campaign was more explicitly radical, functionally it is teaching people that social change comes about through electing better politicians. The campaign has all the features of a mainstream election effort – adoration of a single personality, exaggeration of his “leadership”, meaningless pledges to “get results for you”. This is an elitist approach that reinforces the passivity of people by making someone else the “leader” who gets things done, instead of arguing for all of us to take control over our own lives. The activists and community members who have dived into the Ty Moore campaign are not prioritizing organizing one-on-ones to plan direct actions at work, at school, or in their neighborhoods, or discussing and debating how to replace the racist police with community militias or how narrow gender-roles stifle our humanity or how to build rank & file power against the union bureaucracy. They are rallying around “our guy” and training people to fundraise and to get out the vote. This is the main lesson that participants in the campaign are gaining: How to participate in this unjust system.

This is a piece we’re sharing originally posted to Machete 408 by Adam Weaver. It is a review/summation piece is being released in conjunction with a forthcoming piece by Scott Nappolas which presents an extensive discussion of Lenin’s concept of democratic centralism.

The terrain is changing beneath our feet. Since the collapse of the majority of the “official communist” regimes, the world has witnessed both events and ideas that have undermined the former dominant thinking within the left. The Zapatistas, Argentina in 2001, South Korean workers movements, Oaxaca in 2006, the struggles around anti-globalization, and Greece’s series of insurrectionary moments have increasingly presented challenges to traditional left answers to movements and organization. In previous eras Marxist-Leninism was the nexus which all currents by default had to respond to either in agreement or critique. Today, increasingly anarchist practices and theory have come to play this role.

As a member of an anarchist political organization, a friend once told me I in fact was practicing democratic centralism. This was perplexing, because the group had no resembling structures, practices, or the associated behaviors of democratic centralism. However, I was told that since we debated, came to common decisions, and acted on that collective democracy, we were in fact democratic centralist. This kind of productive confusion led to questions about the concept, and why the target of democratic centralism has shifted. This move, the shifting conceptual territory of core concepts of a certain orthodoxy, comes up repeatedly not only with democratic centralism, but also surrounding ideas like crisis, dialectics, the State, and class. The resulting cognitive dissonance caused me to investigate attempts at reinvigorating the concept of democratic centralism (democratic centralist revisionism), and understand truly what it is, where it came from, and how it has been practiced.

On May Day, 2012, march as a Popular Front in Montpelier, Vermont in support of:
*Healthcare as a Human Right!
*The Right To Safe Local Farm Food!
*Justice For Migrant Farm Workers!
*The Right For Vermont Workers To Organize!
*The Right of Vermont's Daycare Providers To Organize!
*The Right To A Livable Wage!
*Save Our Post Offices!
*Abenaki/Native American Tribal Forests!
*Town Forests!
*Environmental Justice!
*Renewable Energy Now!
*Justice For Those Impacted By Hurricane Irene!
*Freedon and Unity!
*A People's Democray!

The EZLN has announced the end of the Red Alert due to the end of the consulta and the announcement of the Sixth Declaration of the Selva Lacandona. This set of communiques includes the re-opening of the Caracoles and details of the "Sixth Committee" which is to meet with people or organizations who do not participate in elections to form 'the other campaign'. Meetings will then be held in Chiapas of various sectors with the aim of issuing a common statement agreed by all on September 16.

Editoral statement of new Candian publication called 'Upping the Anti' published by the Autonomy & Solidarity website which "is an on-line network for anti-capitalists who believe that revolutionary transformation will come from workers and oppressed people self-organizing from below and not from the top down organizing of any state, party or union bureaucracy"